The Need to Be Whole Quotes

“We are now reduced to one significant choice. We can take our stand either on the side of life or on the side of death. This will never be presented to us as one large and final choice, but only as a succession of small choices, continuing to the seventh and the seven-hundredth generation. Because we have not forgotten all of our true heritage or lost all of its records, signs, and relics, we can begin to imagine how this would be. By a long persistence of human choosing, not of human life but of the world’s life, which is both its and ours, everything would be changed: how we would live, how we would live together, how we would earn our living, how we would work. If we worked for the world’s life, in good faith, with sufficient love, and knowing how, our work would”
― Wendell Berry, The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice

“A living culture of work lived close to the ground, carried forward into time in the ordinary work and speech of every day, is as far as possible unlike any record that may be made of it. It may be documented as 'oral history', its stories may be remembered and written into books, it may be pictured in old photographs, but no true likeness of it can ever be reenacted or reproduced. When such a culture dies, it is not only dead, it is gone.”
― Wendell Berry, The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice

“The worst temptation of religious people has always been to publish and punish the sins of (other) sinners in this world, with no patience or deference for the judgment of God.”
― Wendell Berry, The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice

“If you see the world’s goodness and beauty, and if you love your own place in it (no deed required), then your love itself will be one of your life’s great rewards.”
― Wendell Berry, The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice

“Unlike the history of great events, the history of families and small places forces us to recognize the past as a shadow from which shadowy figures now and then emerge into the light, take on briefly the substance of a story, a part of a story, a few imaginable details, and merge again into the shadow.”
― Wendell Berry, The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice

“we had better bear in mind also something that I am not the first or the smartest writer to notice: that for the making and sustenance of movements hatred is more effective than love.”
― Wendell Berry, The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice

“War prevails over peace, I imagine, finally because it brings an apparently simple end to the great burden of civilized thought.”
― Wendell Berry, The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice

“I am writing in another age of violence when, again beyond my understanding, gunmen have killed children in their schools and we continue to kill children in war. I can only ask the obvious question: How and how soon, from the high threshold of violence established by the Civil War in the seceded states and Kentucky, might a people be expected to descend to a level even of approximate peace? Or: How might they prevent the militarily acceptable violence of any war from inspiring and excusing unacceptable violence during and after the war?”
― Wendell Berry, The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice

“become good. It would become beautiful. It would make us happy, and not with the future happiness of political promising. It would make us happy as soon as we began to do it.”
― Wendell Berry, The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice

“Actual experience subjects and exposes us to the actual world, in which we must make a living under the obligation to be honest, form opinions under the obligation to be just, and in general suffer the mysteries, obscurities, and complexities that make truth difficult and righteousness imperfect.”
― Wendell Berry, The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice